Buy
Site

UI Designer

3-4 Months

Offerpad is an ibuying realtor solution, built on making the home buying and selling experience, fast, efficient, and more enjoyable, through the use of digital technology.

Offerpad, although an emerging giant from the home buying perspective, they lacked a user-friendly and desirable home searching website. Based off of our findings it was determined that Offerpad lacked basic functionality and features that most of their competitor’s sites possessed.

Speed, speed, and more speed. With such a big project and short turnaround time, this project reeked of challenges ahead. Because of the project timeline there were numerous features that were cut or not fully explored, which led to more work in later initiatives. However, regardless of these constraints we were able to push forward with design that met user needs, and brought parity with the Offerpad product and their competitors.

Part of the reason Offerpad wanted to redesign the buy site was because of lack of parity between their competitors and their own platform. Offerpad initially only offered 5/18 features compared to the next lowest which offered 10/18

Based off of the results listed above it was determined that the main areas of focus for the new redesign were: filtering, map, saving homes, saving searches, property details page, and utilizing consistent components and branding.

To get everyone on the same page, our design team moderated a design sprint to help establish a cohesive direction for what we should pursue as a solution. After one week we were able to determine potential roadblocks, present solutions, and prototype and test a potential solution.

Following the design sprint we decided to conduct a competitive analysis into our competitors buy site components and functions. The main focuses being on filtering, sorting, map layout and functionality, property list layout, and number of properties on a page before pagination.

After conducting our competitive analysis we gained these insights:

• Filtering could be handled in a multitude of different ways however a common pattern was that most companies only displayed the most popular filters and hid the rest.
• Most list layouts followed the a 2 column format allowing for users to see more home options at once.
• Map layout and functionality varied greatly amongst our competitors. However, we noticed that the maps that were most impressive gave their users flexibility and freedom (i.e. drawing boundaries, selecting from the map instead of list, etc.)

Now informed by our research we were able to design Buy Site more confidently and efficiently with less speculation.

As the base of the visual artifacts, we wanted to make sure that this card properly communicated the most important content to users at a glance, as well as follows and be consistent with the Offerpad branding guidelines.

Based off of our research the card format was very similar across various competitors and companies so rather than reinvent the wheel, we took from what other companies did well.

The original map had very little functionality and it was very difficult for users to understand which homes were Offerpad owned. Because Offerpad homes offer benefits to buyers, they wanted to emphasize that more throughout the map experience.

The original filter format was clunky and no responsive, the filter format also was not user-friendly offering no easy way to view your selections and recognize the changes you made to the filter.

In order to solve this problem we consolidate the number of filters that were visible to the user at first glance and allow for a more robust option for when trying to filter for less generic information.

One of the biggest challenges was trying to find and consolidate the filtering on mobile. we explored numerous positions and even thought about exposing some chips on mobile but decided against, because we felt it was more beneficial to the user to have more scrollable space.

Once all of the elements were designed the final step was to bring it together, to make it a cohesive design solution.

We saw a significant increase in the number of users utilizing the saved home feature, as well as tag homes. This increased the time spent on the page as well as help Offerpad bring parody of features to its platform.

That being said our work as a team was not done. Although the redesign was a success, the next steps are to monitor a lot of the new features to better understand if there are improvements that could be made or even product opportunities we could build out to elevate the experience even more.